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Barbecue From Coast to Coast

By WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT; William E. SChmidt is the Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times.

Published: July 3, 1988

THE Dreamland Drive Inn Bar-B-Q, on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa, Ala., looks like a good barbecue restaurant ought to look: a smoky, clapboard building with a screen door that slaps shut, a graveled parking lot, tables with chipped Formica tops. There is just one thing on the menu at the Dreamland, and that is pork ribs, ritually served up with a couple of slabs of white bread on a paper plate.

I made my first visit there in the company of some people from the University of Alabama who wanted to show me the town. The ribs were good, but I didn't really understand how good until a university representative effortlessly delivered what I have since come to regard as the ultimate compliment, the highest sanction, the measure and standard against which all other barbecue will forever be judged. ''These ribs,'' she said, wiping some sauce from her chin, ''make your tongue want to slap your brains out.''

This is one of the wonderful things about barbecue. It alone, of all native American cuisine, has the capacity to evoke such passion and debate and rhetorical flourish. Barbecue, indeed, may be one of the few foods that is as much fun to talk about and argue about as it is to eat.

Calvin Trillin, a man who has written more about barbecue than any single person would probably ever want to read, once recalled a barbecue festival in Memphis, where he overheard among the cooks a liturgy of barbecue refrains and responses rich enough to fill a small catechism. There were phrases like: ''Why, you taste these ribs, you'll throw rocks at other folks' ribs.'' Or, ''Hopefully, we're going to give you a rib that'll make your breath come hard.''

There is no great mystery to why this is so. The first thing to know about barbecue, be it beef or pork, rib or shoulder, is that it is not merely a food. In the South especially, it is a cultural ritual, practiced with a kind of religious fervor among various barbecue sects, each of whom believes their particular concoction of smoke and sauce and spices is the only true way to culinary salvation.

Indeed, it is a measure of the role that barbecue plays in Southern culture that few politicans would dare seek public office in the South without having the capacity not only to consume vast quanities of barbecue, but the ability to appear as if they were enjoying every mouthful.

It was Herbert O'Keef, the former editor of The Raleigh Times, who once even penned an axiom about it. ''No man,'' wrote Mr. O'Keef, ''has ever been elected Governor of North Carolina without eating more barbecue than was good for him.'' Predictably, many places claim the origin of barbecue, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has its etymological beginnings, anyhow, in the Spanish ''barbacoa,'' a word adapted among the natives of both Haiti and Guiana to refer to a rude framework of sticks placed above a fire to roast meat. The first American reference to barbecue as a kind of social event comes from Washington Irving, in the 1809 edition of the ''Knickerbocker Tales,'' in which he refers to the ''great 'barbecue,' a kind of festivity or carouse much practiced in Merryland.'' And as early as 1728, visitors to the Carolinas were commenting on the affection settlers there seemed to show for roasted pork.

''The truth of it is,'' wrote William Byrd of Virginia, ''the inhabitants of North Carolina devour so much swine's flesh that it fills them full of gross humours.'' But it is the Texans, as is their wont, who claim to have invented commercial barbecue, when local butchers near the turn of the century started smoking unsold scraps of beef on Saturdays, to increase their flavor and preserve them until the market reopened Monday. Alabamians also claim barbecue as their own invention.

To be sure, barbecue these days is not exclusively a phenomenon of Texas or the South. It is possible to find barbecue places (nobody ever calls them restaurants) in other cities. Kansas City, in particular, is famous for its beef barbecue, and a place like Arthur Bryant's rightfully belongs in the pantheon of barbecue, alongside such shrines as the Dreamland and the Rendezvous in Memphis. But it is also true that, in the North, barbecue has a different context.

Northerners just behave differently around barbecue. There was a good example of this recently in Evanston, a town north of Chicago and the lofty home of Northwestern University. Some people in Evanston actually complained to the city about the sultry, smoky, seductive aroma that emanates from Hecky's, a rib place of some local renown. Fortunately, Hecky's has a wide base of admirers, who have responded with enthusiasm to a sign placed along the street outside their kitchen. It faces passing traffic and reads: ''Honk if you like our smell.''

Part of this is just a matter of upbringing. A lot of Yankees, including me, grew up up thinking that barbecue is a verb, as in, let's fire up the backyard grill and barbecue some hot dogs. Grammatically speaking, you cannot argue with this: it is certainly proper to use barbecue as a verb, to cook anything you would like.